A long-standing band of mine, Party Pack Ice, recorded an album last year. The playing on the record sounds great, and I’m currently working with Nathaniel Morgan to finish the mixes. We should have a finished product by the Spring time. One of my favorite tracks on the album had two versions that I really loved, but it didn’t make sense to have the same song on the album twice. So I have released the alternate take of a song called The Stephanies via Bandcamp. Please enjoy the track free of charge! It was mixed and rough mastered by Nathaniel Morgan, and features these awesome musicians:

Some really exciting things going on with Out of Your Head Brooklyn through the summer (and hopefully beyond!) We have found an awesome home inThrees Brewing, and are excited to have an extended run of dates for the summer.

We’ve just secured (and are very, very excited about) these dates at Threes. For May, June, July, and August we will be at Threes on the LAST Sunday of every month. Easy to remember, right? Those dates will be:

Sunday May 31
Sunday June 28
Sunday July 26
Sunday August 30

And hot off the press, to end this awesome co-curated run with Danny Gouker & Eric Trudel, here is the lineup for Sunday May 31. Huge thanks to Eric & Danny for all their work on this–these sets have been truly awesome & inspiring!

Hey Friends! It’s been a little while, and maybe about time for me to post some 2015 happenings and updates. Some great things on the horizon for the return of Out of Your Head Brooklyn and our new home Threes Brewing, and some recordings that should be coming soon. Also the music series that I help curate (65Fen Music Series) is off a great start and really has some momentum–read all about this stuff below. Or if you’ve had enough, carry on! Some updates:

Out of Your Head Brooklyn:

We have a new home for the series to occur monthly at a great new venue in Gowanus, Brooklyn called Threes Brewing. We did our debut event in the space with three bands, and three VERY different sets of music. It was great fun, and a huge success all around, so we’ve been invited to return. In the interest of keeping the series fresh, and keeping attendance always up I have decided to just do OOYH BK once a month, but with three sets each night. Might as well make it a hang, right? The new venue is awesome–they have great beer, and are some of the friendliest folks around, so please try to check one of these out! The upcoming dates are:

BeepHonk (Dave Ballou, Anthony Pirog, Mike Kuhl, and myself) is a band that came to life in Baltimore after a chance meeting on a night Out of Your Head about 4 years ago. It was so good that we made it a band, but until now had not recorded any music with the group. We went into Ben Frock’s awesome new Baltimore studio Heartwood Sound Studio. It looks like we got an album’s worth of material, so we’ll be doing something with it in the later part of this year.

Party Pack ICE is a band I started in NY, but when I still lived in Baltimore. It started as a guitar trio of myself, Dustin Carlson, and Nathan Ellman-Bell, but after doing one performance (and only one performance to date!) with Patrick Breiner & Eric Trudel both on tenor saxophones, I decided to never go back to the trio. I have a lot of music that I wrote between 2011 and now for the band, and it’s time to get it on record. In mid-March Nathaniel Morgan will be recording the band, and who knows when it will see the light of day, but I’m excited to get it down on tape.

Also, I’m hopefully finally getting the Lubbock record mastered and released. Lubbock is a Baltimore-based dectet that is very near and dear to my heart, consisting of some of my best friends and favorite musicians anywhere. We recorded a 7-track album in January 2012, with compositions by myself, Dave Ballou, Eric Trudel, and Colin Renick. I love the record, and I’m excited to hopefully soon allow it to see the light of day! Lubbock is John Dierker, Eric Trudel, Cam Collins, and Colin Renick on reeds, Dave Ballou, Brent Madsen, and Jim McFalls on brass, and Chris Pumphrey, myself, and Nathan Ellman-Bell in the rhythm section.

65Fen Music Series:

There is a great new music series happening in Flatbush Brooklyn that I am really happy to be a part of as one of six curators. 65Fen Music Series is a weekly event (every Monday night) featuring two sets of music by two different bands. Each week is curated by one of Josh Sinton, Patrick Breiner, Michael Foster, Sean Ali, Jake Henry, or myself. The greater number of curators than normal really allows for a huge range of different types of bookings, so it’s been quite different so far from week-to-week. My next week of curating will happen on Monday March 9 and feature .michael. (Michael Sachs & Michael Buishas) at 8:30pm, and Patrick Breiner’s Double Double at 9:45pm. More information and a full schedule can be found at 65fenmusicseries.tumblr.com.

Upcoming Performances:

And some upcoming performances that I am particularly excited about (please see the performances page of this site for a more comprehensive list and more details about the following):

Here’s a video clip of (part of) one of the pieces from Haverchuck at Barbes’ Palimpsestic Series on January 15, 2014. Sorry for the audio clipping! Going to be posting some videos of the recent quartet performance as well. Coming soon…enjoy, and thanks for listening!

The Party Pack ICE performance last night was super fun…so much fun that I don’t think we’ll ever return to just being the trio of Party Pack. Huge thanks to Aryeh Kobrinsky for putting the night together…two awesome bands followed us, and it was a great night of music all around. PP ICE is Eric Trudel & Patrick Breiner-tenors, Dustin Carlson-guitar, AH-bass, compositions, and Nathan Ellman-Bell-drums. Here’s the full set in mp3 format…feel free to download and pass along to a friend. Enjoy!

It’s be a little while since my last post, and a lot of exciting stuff has happened in the meantime. I had the pleasure of joining the Elina Duni Quartet (an amazing Swiss band on ECM records) for a week-long US tour which ended in a hurricane. It was a great experience to perform with such a talented group of people, and get to know them personally. I hope to have the opportunity to play music with them again in the near future.

The Lubbock record is now completely mixed by Jake Leckie, and it sounds awesome. If you need any kind of recording work done in the Baltimore area (studio or live audio) this is your guy. The recording quality is top-notch, and the mixing he was able to do with very little time is perfect for the record. We’re hoping to get it mastered and do a few blowout release shows in Spring 2013. I’m very proud of this record.

Some other great shows were mixed in over the course of the past few months, and I have some upcoming that I’m really excited about. The most immediate is the debut performance by Party Pack ICE. This is an ensemble I’ve been trying to put together for the last year and I just recently completed the arrangements and started rehearsing the band. It is the normal trio of Party Pack (Dustin Carlson-guitar, AH-bass, & Nathan Ellman-Bell-drums) but with the addition of my two favorite tenor players Eric Trudel and Patrick Breiner. We’ll be playing Friday, November 30 at Douglass Street Music Collective as part of Aryeh Kobrinsky’s Nowt Nite. This is a great series that Aryeh curates monthly. The most exciting part of the series is that he live steams it, so you can watch from anywhere in the world! It will also be available via iTunes as a podcast in the next week or so. If you’d like to check it out live just tune into the link below at 8:00p on Friday, November 30. Party Pack ICE is first, so get there early and stay late.

Friday 12/7–I’ll be premiering my new trio with Anna Webber-sax and Nathan Ellman-Bell-drums. All new compositions that I’ve written over the past couple of months just for these two musicians. We’ll be playing at iBeam on Friday 12/7 at 9:30p.

Monday 12/10 & Tuesday 12/11–I’ll be part of a 96-hour improvisation put together by the Music Factory. It is an ambitious idea and I can’t wait to contribute (and see who I’ll be performing with at noon on a Monday!) You can check out what they’re doing at newlanguages.org.

Thursday 12/13–I’ll be participating in a large ensemble experiment put together by Josh Sinton at Douglass Street Music Collective. Details forthcoming about this performance, but I am very excited about it. I respect Josh so much as a musician that I’d trust anything he puts together!

Sunday 12/16–Out of Your Head Brooklyn has been going strong for almost a year, and the last one of the year will be my first one performing! I’ve had so many people interested in the series that I just didn’t schedule myself to play. As part of Josh Sinton’s curatorial run he insisted that I perform, and I’m excited to do so with a quintet of Ed Rosenberg & Nathaniel Morgan-reeds, Dave Miller-guitar, AH-bass, and Martin Urbach-drums. Thanks Josh, that’s an awesome band! OOYH is every 1st and 3rd Sunday at Freddy’s Bar and Backroom, 627 5th Ave, South Slope.

Wednesday 12/19–Danny Gouker‘s Signal Problems take on the Branded Saloon in Prospect Heights. This will be our last performance before we go into the studio in early January to record the band’s debut record.

Thursday 1/24–This is the BIG ONE! My Baltimore-based band Quartet Offensive will be reuniting after a bit of a (unintentional) hiatus to share a bill with JERSEYBAND! Don’t need to say much else about this one. It’s at the Ottobar and if you’re in Baltimore I can’t recommend it highly enough. Those guys.

Wednesday 1/30–Denial & Error will be putting it back together as part of Oscar Noriega’s Palimpsestic Series at Barbes in Brooklyn. I was sad to have to miss the most recent gig with this band because of the ECM tour. Excited to be doing it again! The band is Kate Pittman-drums, compositions, Josh Reed-trumpet, Landon Knoblock-rhodes, and AH-bass. Kate Pittman writes great music, and I have a great time playing it with her. This set start at 8:00p at Barbes.